A Labour MP has claimed her party has a "problem with women getting to the top" as she accused all Westminster groups of caring more about by-elections than sexual harassment.

Jess Phillips, a long-term campaigner for women's rights, said her party and all others in the Houses of Parliament were more concerned with politics, power and position than the alleged rape of Labour activist Bex Bailey.

She said: "The Labour Party has a problem with women getting to the top - there's no two ways about it.

"The Labour Party has a problem with women in leadership positions - that's just a fact."

Ms Phillips also apologised on behalf of her party if it had any involvement in the delivery of a coffin to Conservative Sarah Wollaston's constituency office.

She said the incident was "totally unacceptable" and praised Ms Wollaston for holding the Government to account as an MP, adding: "I can only, if the Labour Party had any involvement, apologise wholeheartedly for that."

And Ms Phillips rejected a suggestion by Tory Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) that female surgeons should not be appointed on a quota system.

He asked the debate in Westminster Hall on women in the House of Commons after the 2020 election: "Would you want to be operated on by a female surgeon who got the job because that hospital needed to achieve its quota of surgeons for that case? No, I don't think so."

The former Women's Aid worker later responded: "The idea that I wouldn't want a surgeon who had been selected on a quota to operate on me is not something I recognise:

"I would be absolutely delighted to have somebody who had been selected on an all women's shortlist to be the surgeon in my hospital operate on me.

"I would be less happy to have somebody who had probably got the position because he went to a certain school, because he was born to a certain family - he would be no better, he just will have been given all of the tools that allowed him to become a surgeon and to dream of becoming a surgeon."

Pictured Jess Phillips holds Birmingham Yardley on June 9, 2017.

She said the problem with women getting to the top of her party was partially because they "don't defend the status quo - we act as radicals to change".

Ms Phillips claimed it was "very difficult to get people to vote for radicals or things that would affect the actual status quo", and said Labour struggles because the "women would definitely upset the apple cart as they always have in our movement".

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She later said: "Nothing more than the last few months has shown me that my political party - as well as every political party in this building - cares more about politics, power and position than it cared, for example, about my friend Bex.

"It is basically to say the problem has to go away on its own to think that political parties have the will within them to do this themselves, because they absolutely don't.

"They care more about by-elections and by-election results than they will ever care about the problem of sexual harassment, for example."